"Bluh bluh bluh, my mother got eated by giants, bluh." - the full script of "Attack on Titan"

[snarp]

Does Manpain MacAran ever get to be less of a narcissist? Or does he die, so we can get a less infuriating protagonist? In real life people who react to disasters like this - like they're the only person who's been hurt, like they literally can't see other people's problems until they're shoved right in their faces - are not the heroes.

I am not the target audience for this kid's shit! Mikasa and Armin so far are much more admirable characters. Can't we kill him off and put Mikasa in charge?

Comments

[inkstone]

This is the main reason I haven't been able to get into Attack on Titan. I like Mikasa a lot but no. I can't. I even looked up spoilers to see if something would make me more interested! No, they didn't.

[esmenet]

I think literally everyone wants to put Mikasa in charge. There was a tweet from an RPer the other day saying 'if Mikasa had sworn to kill all titans the series would have been over by episode three.' SHE IS THE BEST.

Personally I find Eren hilarious and totally fucking nutso by turns and at once; I thought he was extremely dull until his shounen heroism was revealed to be basically the WORST POSSIBLE CHARACTER TRAIT FOR ANYONE TO HAVE IN THE ENTIRE SNK UNIVERSE, and now I just go 'oh eren, you suck at everything and it's adorable. (also are you high, seriously, what is up with that face you are making)' --Which is to say, I'm not sure if he gets less worse or not, but the narrative does not condone his attitude at all, and is in fact basically screaming at him YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG. EVERYTHING. LITERALLY EVERYTHING.* JUST STOP OR YOU'RE GOING TO GET EVERYONE KILLED. ACTUALLY WE'RE MAKING YMIR THE PROTAGONIST NOW, YOU CAN JUST . . . SIT RIGHT THERE AND DON'T. DO. ANYTHING.

*except for motivational speaking, he is decent at that.

[surskitty]

He has not yet had meaningful character development to become less of an asshole, though he's probably going to BSOD next chapter. Or whenever he connects a few dots; he's not very smart so it might take a bit longer. But the setup is there and he is finally going to have it shoved in his face that he's terrible.

I'm pretty sure the narrative's aware that Eren's not heroic; it just comes off as crappy writing rather than subverting expectations of shounen protagonists. Eren is really fucked up.

A lot of the cast would like for him to shut the fuck up, and it's much more of an ensemble cast by this point than it is The Story of Eren. Eren's current narrative role is to yell a lot about how he doesn't understand any of this plot shit and no one cares enough about him to actually explain. Much of the cast is pretending he's not there. I think Mikasa and Armin are the only cast members who think he's remotely tolerable, actually. (They need a better friend; their backstories are way worse than Eren's and yet Eren is the one who always goes on about shit.)

[kaigou]

I got the impression that all three main characters are the stereotypes taken to eleven. It's just that in Mikasa's case, ramping up the fighting damsel (who rarely can actually do anything when push comes to shove) means you get a damsel who genuinely kicks ass. I first realized it with Armin, because he's every sidekick bright-but-weak taken to brilliant-but-helpless levels, especially given it's called out explicitly that he comes up with ideas that saves everyone's asses. Which means he's not just brilliant but helpless, he's also so focused on being helpless that he's completely deaf to anything remotely adequate about himself. That meant it didn't take me long to see Eren the same way: every annoying shounen-hero feature, jacked up to the nth. Holy dawg, I never realized how annoying shounen heroes could be.

I haven't read the manga, but in the anime, it's played so straight-up that I can't tell whether it's bad writing (of taking mid-level and ramping it up on the theory that if some is good, a whole lot must automatically be lots better) or if it's meant to be mocking the genre. I mean, the author could be trolling the entire shounen readership, but the anime's so visually striking that it kind of overshadows the trolling, if it's meant to be there.

[yeloson]

The first few episodes are the most annoying because they spend the most time on Eren. Later, you realize despite his manpain bullshit, he's really the rescue-princess of the story - Mikasa and Armin are the protagonists.